Multimedia home entertainment is desirable to consumers who seek out new kinds of listening and viewing content that are made available through a variety of communication media, including wireless broadcast and cable systems. Two such forms of multimedia home entertainment are pay per view (PPV) and video-on-demand (VOD) services. Each service offers a viewer a video (e.g., a motion picture) that is delivered for viewing by the viewer who orders and pays for the viewing. The VOD service offers the viewer a video that can be requested at any time and is available for viewing at the discretion of the viewer. Each service can be offered and delivered by wireless communication, such as satellite or cellular telephone services, or by wired communication, such as a cable television service.
Both the PPV service provider and the VOD service provider are referred to herein as a video delivery service provider, a network operator (netop) or a multisystem operator (MSO). The MSO offers video delivery services to viewers via a communication system by the distribution of PPV assets and/or VOD assets, which are collectively and individually referred to here as video assets. Examples of video assets include movies, TV shows, special interest programming, etc. Video assets are obtained from a content provider or other service having ownership rights in the video assets. The video delivery service provider, in turn, has received distribution rights from the content provider. As an enticement to the viewer, the content provider may provide an advertisement about a video asset. This advertisement may be used by the MSO to create a visual link from a homepage or storefront that can be viewed by the viewer. When the visual link is selected by the viewer, a distribution of the video asset to the viewer can be initiated.
It can be expected that the satellite and cable industry will continue to transition from linear channel programming to more content available on an on demand basis. A consequence of this transition is that more VOD and PPV assets, and advertisements therefore, will become available for distribution to viewers. With the addition of content available in an on demand basis, the convenience and user-friendliness of navigation by the viewer to VOD and PPV assets that the viewer would mostly likely purchase is of increasing importance.
Known trends exist for viewing audiences in television watching. These trends are often characterized by parts of the television day, or ‘dayparts’. Television dayparts normally include morning, daytime, early fringe, primetime, and late fringe. Saturday and Sunday include special categories such as access and late night. Primetime is an example of a television daypart, defined as 8-11 PM EST Monday through Saturday, and 7-11 PM EST on Sunday. Primetime generally offers access to the widest variety of viewers. The advertising industry uses a finely honed principal of content targeting and promotion to attract the greatest audience for each consecutive daypart.
A present drawback to the content provider, the MSO, and to television viewing audiences is that content that the television viewing audiences would mostly likely purchase, according to known daypart trends, is not readily pointed out by targeted advertising to the television viewing audiences. Moreover, finding and navigating to VOD and PPV assets that a viewer would mostly likely purchase is neither convenient nor user-friendly. It would be an advantage in the art to provide such capabilities for both timely asset promotion and logical and timely navigation assistance so as to provide a benefit to the content provider, the MSO, and to television viewing audiences.
The creation of advertisements or promotions for VOD and PPV assets, as well as other products and services, entails production time and management for both the advertiser (e.g., a video asset content owner, product seller, or service provider) and the MSO (or its designated third party video asset aggregator). The various tasks necessary for a MSO to make one or more requests of the advertiser for the video asset(s), and any interactive advertisements supporting the same, requires significant coordination and communication between these two or more parties. The structure of a broadcast carousel at a headend of an MSO and common navigation controls made available for use by a viewer in order to select a video asset for viewing on a viewer input device (such as Home and Back buttons) must be communicated to a designer of an interactive ad. This complication is significantly compounded by the normal business factors that constitute the MSO business operations. These normal MSO business operations include, but are not limited to, multiple headend locations, variations in headend infrastructure, disparate video delivery servers and back office systems, multiple content partners, different subscriber access rules, large disparities in video asset usage and license rights, and multiple video asset viewing windows. The coordinating of the distribution of video assets to viewers, each of which can have complicated content ownership rights and distribution rights, can be a difficult and complicated task to perform by the MSO. There is, at present, an absence of automation tools to facilitate communication between several video asset owners partnered with an MSO. This lack of automated communication makes the tasks of collecting and scheduling video assets and interactive advertising at each appropriate headend somewhat hindered. This hindrance diminishes the ability of the MSO to use interactive advertising as a vehicle to promote video assets, particularly during a relevant daypart, so as to increase video delivery buy rates by viewers. It would be advantageous to provide systems and other tools to implement such an automated communication.